Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described herein are not prior art to the claims in the present application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some cloud computing environments implement usage-based billing based on CPU execution time. For example, in the MICROSOFT WINDOWS AZURE cloud service, the pricing may be $0.05 per hour for an extra small compute instance, $0.12 per hour for a small compute instance, $0.24 per hour for a medium compute instance, $0.48 per hour for a large compute instance, and $0.96 per hour for an extra large compute instance, which may be respectively configured with a single 1 GHz CPU, a single 1.6 GHz CPU, two 1.6 GHz CPUs, four 1.6 GHz CPUs, or eight 1.6 GHz CPUs.
In the case of a data-oriented application, the required CPU execution time may increase or decrease depending on the amount and the nature of the data such that it can be difficult for a developer to estimate the CPU execution time, and therefore the cost, in advance. In the case of a data mining program for extracting preferred customers from a customer information database, for example, the amount of relevant data in the customer information database may be unknown in advance such that the CPU execution time required to mine all the relevant data, and therefore the cost to mine the relevant data, cannot be estimated in advance. Accordingly, while the rate for using a cloud computing environment may be known in advance, the cost is uncertain and/or unknown to the same extent that the usage amount of the cloud computing environment is also uncertain and/or unknown.